The F8 Facebook 8 Updates Marketers Need To Know April 2016

In this years F8 update, Mark Zuckerberg elaborated on his 10 year plan for Facebook. Its Facebooks beautiful mission to connect everyone in the world. From beaming down internet from the sky to areas that currently are without Internet, to building upon the ecosystems and products they already have in place with new technologies.

Update #1: Messenger Platform

BOTS! (or a perhaps a more politically correct term that is to be developed in the not so distant future virtual assistants). With 900M monthly users using Messenger, it is Facebooks intention to revolutionize how people interact with brands. Anything from getting updates on orders made, creating new orders, subscription automation, etc. All I can say is I look forward to being able to order a pizza from Dominos via Facebook hopefully in the near future!

Update #2 Live API

Live API offers a new way for developers and publishers to join forces to build immersive and interactive live video experiences on Facebook. With Facebook Video views at a new all-time high 100 million hours of video are watched on Facebook per day! you can bet that number is going to rise. In fact Buffer stated: Marketers can expect Live Video to be the #1 priority in the Facebook algorithm. Youll no longer need a smart phone in order to live stream; with the API your brands options are whatever you make them to be. Early adopting brands are sure to gain the most out of this.

Update #3 Video Discovery

Just prior to F8, Facebook launched a new mobile way to discover videos via searching for them as well as browsing top videos. Users are beginning to post less and less about their personal lives and are orienting around content that is supplied by news organizations. In one way this is a concern, but in another adding the ability to better discover videos is must more beneficial for Facebook to increase sharing of content, instead of waiting for users to happen to come across videos in their normal newsfeed. Marketers should begin to analyze and understand this new tool to reverse engineer how they might be able to boost their videos discover-ability. Can you say Facebook SEO?

Update #4 Virtual Reality

Now this technology is still incredibly young, but early adopting companies are sure to get a lot of exposure out of it. Facebook just reviewed a 360 degree video camera that will film VR footage. Now all you have to do is be willing to drop $30,000 on that camera. On top of that they demoed Oculus Rift or as Facebook calls it, their social VR technology. Long distance relationships do not fear you no longer have to be in the same room as a loved one in order to see and interact with them. Businesses should be working with creative agencies to develop initial ideas on how they can use this technology to make their marketing campaigns cool. Early adopters again will win here!

Update #5 Quote Sharing

Facebook has announced a new Quote Sharing feature. Users will easily be able to share quotes and add thoughts or comments before sharing to Facebook from articles, books, and other apps. Publishers and content heavy app providers should look at integrating this into their experience to make it all the more easier for users to share their content. This is a simple feature, but if it makes the user experience easier, and more interesting then its bound to lead to more traffic for content providers.

Update #6 Save Button

With users growing familiar with saving content all across the web via various applications such as pocket and EverNote theyre now going to be able to do with Facebook as well. Facebook confirms that youll be able to view saved links later from any device. Marketers should keep track of the engagement in terms of how often their articles are Saved. Its our guess that more saves means you have a catchy headline that gains attention, and Save allows them to come back to read it at a later time. Tracking saves will be interesting for businesses to track to determine whats working and whats not working.

Update #7 Account Kit

Now this is cool! In todays busy world people love skipping over creating accounts. It all started as sign in as guest which in essence was the same process as creating an account without providing them a password so you can log back in later. Then it progressed to Login with Facebook. Now imagine being able to login with a phone number or email address without the need for a password (talk about security)!

People can use Account Kit without sharing any information from their Facebook profile—they won’t even need a Facebook account to use it. We expect Account Kit to help increase sign-ups. In fact an early adopted Saavn, a music streaming app, experienced a 33% increase in daily registrations after integrating Account Kit for 2 months. For those that like hard numbers they saw over 500,000 registered phone number users sign up. It just goes to show K.I.S.S. (Keep it Simple Stupid).

Update #8 Instant Articles

This has been around since May 2015, but is now open to all publishers of any size. What do Instant Articles do? Well, they make the user experience better inside of Facebook. It makes the reading experience as much as ten times faster than standard mobile web articles – which Facebook say can take up to 8 seconds to load.

Some early statistics:

Instant Articles received 20% more clicks than mobile web articles from the News Feed

Once someone clicks on an Instant Article, they’re70% less likely to abandon the article before reading

AND They are shared 30% more than mobile web articles on average

If you have a blog and content is a big driver for your business then this is definitely something youll want to look into to increase your results.

– Mike Knorr, Director of Sales

Listen to our CEO’s podcast “The Daily Drive” to stay driven and get great business insights from top business leaders. –